


The Children’s Army Of Pale Snakes

by Paranormal_Shitness



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Brit bashing, Digital Art, Fan Art, Slow Burn, this is being written because Kojima had a shit take on Lord Of The Flies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-03-11 14:32:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13526280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paranormal_Shitness/pseuds/Paranormal_Shitness
Summary: The study is simple: place a member of Big Boss’ prognegy amoungst children of the criminal class and see how capable he is of rallying an army from the riffraff.Seems an easy job watching a gaggle of children.Perhaps no one told the observers that snakes eat both mice and men.





	1. I Take No Food

**Author's Note:**

> Stuck on my other two fics but knew what I wanted to do with this one so i’m giving myself time to plot those ones out before I continue lmao.
> 
> Edit: Chapter 2 is finished and waiting for editing I hope to post it within the next four days

The compound they bring him to is all walls and guards stood around the perimeter. It’s hot in an unforgiving light. Outdoor corridors and hallways open to courtyards bathed in viscous sun. He’s sweating by the time the wind of the helicopter blades is off his back. The Staff Seargent puts a heavy hand into the pool of sweat between his shoulders and pushes him into a brisk walk.

‘This is soon to be an education center for wayward boys,’ the man says. ‘And your new home.’

He chuffs quietly to himself. As if he’s ever had a place to call home, or would ever feel comfortable in a borstal. 

The flat, squat buildings around him are mostly poured concrete. The bared pates of their square roofs seem quaint when compared to the tall hats of buildings back in England. Lacking individualism and character. 

Much like the men who patrol them. Unreadable faces hidden behind mirrored sun glass lenses, mouths lines of impass beneath their dark berets.

‘You’ve been given a new civilian identity,’ the Staff Seargent tells him, but he isn’t listening all that much. ‘This is to let you mingle with the civilian children more easily. To them you will be known as Eli. This designation is already in place on all of your paperwork. No more Snake. You aren’t to mention anything about that to anyone. Not even the teachers or the doctors. It would be best if you did not speak of it even with me.’

‘And what if I break this protocol?’ He asks.

The Staff Seargent stops walking abruptly and with such a force that the hand on his back presses down into his spine relentlessly, and he’s forced to come to a similarly abrupt halt in his paces. A pair of mirrored sunglasses swing into his face then, and he’s held captivated for a moment by his own shocked visage reflected in their gold plates. 

He looks like twins reflected in these buglike eyes, and it sets an odd feeling of longing in his chest. 

‘Do you know the purpose of this exercise?’ The Staff Seargent asks.

Eli nods, silently resentful.

‘And how many mad men are chosen as world leaders?’ The man presses threateningly. 

‘Ever done any study into cults?’ Eli asks.

There’s a disgust with which the warden breaks away from him. One heightened by the nauseating heat of the day. Some sort of animal, perhaps a cicada or a wild bird calls raucously in the distance of this momentary silence.

‘If you break protocol during this assignment you will be thrown into solitary confinement that you may reflect on your actions for a length of time justifiable by your actions,’ the man’s impationate back tells him, without turning. 

And then they continue walking.

Their boots crunch paired prints into sun bleached red sand, and then leave scatterings of it over shaded pavement underneath the awnings of the hallways.

‘You will receive your new dossier when we reach medical.’

‘Is that much of a walk from here?’ 

‘Across the compound.’

Eli sighs to himself, but this minor insubordination is ignored. Perhaps allowed because of his age. He makes a mental note that the Warden is fond of being condescending as they come through a tunnel between two buildings and upon another courtyard.

A date palm leans heavily against the wall that hugs two of the courtyard’s open facing sides, bows heavy with fuit, and laden with hungry flies. He watches it with equal parts awe and revulsion as they pass. And yet he’s drawn to it. It’s position. It’s near freedom. Trapped in a forever ongoing struggle to be with it’s brothers outside this cruel enclosure.

The Staff Seargent smacks him in the arm, reminding him to keep pace. 

‘Our civilian imports will be arriving within the week so you have a bit of time to settle into your new identity and schedule before the exercise begins,’ his debriefing continues. 

He wants to ask why they assume he’ll need so long, but he’s still distracted by the palm and it’s advantageous position even as they pass out of the second court yard into another small tunnel, and make a sudden stop at a door hidden in the shadows there. He’s so indisposed with his own thoughts on the thing that the Staff Seargent’s movements catch him completely flat footed, and he nearly plows into the man. 

A dirty look pins him from under gold rims. 

So it’s not a very big compound at all then.

Then it’s three hard knocks on the door and Eli has to be sure to tune out just before the customary yelling begins.

‘Staff Seargent Begum, with charge!’

There’s a largely inaudible shout from the other side of the door, and they use it as a key for entry.

Were the room a stage with a live studio audience and one of the walls (the one with windows onto the courtyard with the palm date) cut out, they would be entering from stage left to a cacophony of recorded laughter as their eyes drank in for the first time: the strange, gawky doctor arranged in his seat in some poor semblance of innocent humanity, stage right. Eli recoils visibly from his odd body posture as the silent laugh track stretches on.

‘So, checking up,’ the man says, folding his long, angular limbs something like a cricket and all but springing from his desk chair. 

Eli finds his distaste deepening impossibly further. It almost seems prudent to hide behind the Staff Seargent but his pride refuses to allow him the safety of even that. He stands rooted, almost frozen as the shambling mass of limbs blunders toward them.

‘This is Eli?’ The doctor asks in a strange tone, inflections in all the wrong places.

‘This is Eli,’ Staff Seargent Begum agrees, nodding his golden glasses in Eli’s vague direction.

The doctor rings his unaturally long fingers together. ‘Well that’s exciting,’ he says lowly. ‘I’ve heard so much about you- I’ve spoken to a few of the doctors that worked on your project. Dr. Clarke in particular- he told me-‘

‘Emil,’ the Staff Seargent barks then, stopping the words dead in their ceaseless tumble from the doctor’s thin mouth.

‘Yes, sorry,’ Doctor Emil says quickly, ‘I’ve got an order for some blood tests, and a little bitty brain scan to determine your current status.’

‘Smashing,’ Eli tells the man sarcastically. 

‘I’m glad we feel the same way,’ Emil chirps, apparently oblivious to the tone of Eli’s words. 

Then, with a great sweeping motion, Emil moves to one of the tables, and unfolds his unearthly, tendril-like fingers to indicate it. ‘Please if you would take a seat,’ he suggests, for the first time in a tone and cadence reminiscent of something a normal British person might say. 

Eli decides then that it’s clearly obvious this odd entity must actually have come from Scotland or Whales or one of those lesser countries the homeland had so graciously encorporated even to it’s own detriment. He looks, skeptically, at the table before placing his hands on it, palm heels first, and hoisting himself backward into a delicate perch on the cracked brown leather. If the dry peels hurt as they dig into the backs of his thighs just beneath the cut off of his shorts he doesn’t show it.

‘And arm out,’ Emil instructs, thrusting his left arm forward to such an overextent that it bends and bows ethereally.

Eli does as he’s told in hopes the spectacle will go away and is rewarded handsomely as Emil withdraws his appendages to snap on a pair of latex gloves. 

It’s quiet. Staff Seargent Begum watches the proceedings before him with the placid facade of impartial judgement.

This is a familiar ritual. Through all the years of being a lab rat, Eli’s gotten quite used to cluttered rooms of equipment just like this. To needles, and blood vials, and having to sit still while hes poked and prodded. It’s all very like being a dog that’s regularly taken to the groomer but with a slightly more macabre air. He doesn’t even flinch as the hollow metal cylinder presses through his skin and into a vein. It’s not the prick he minds but the sucking sensation as empty glass vials are fitted to the tubing on the needle.

They fill like plump mosquitos, thirsty for his blood. Guzzling it down their gullets so it splashes against their insides. 

The doctor coos approvingly as he switches a full vial for another empty one. 

‘You really are a prefect subject,’ Emil says as he pulls the needle out, and presses a cotton swab down on the pinprick of blood it leaves behind. ‘Full of life, really. Just juicy with vitality.’

‘That’s why they call me Liquid,’ Eli mumbles, still watching with interest as his own body fluids rattle around in their new cases. Blood sausages, he thinks as Emil whisks the little tray they’re on away from sight.

‘As opposed to your siblings: solid, plasma and gas?’ Emil jokes.

Eli gives him a halfhearted chuff at the ridiculous suggestion. ‘More like Shit and Fart.’

‘Oh that’s funny. It’d mean your name was piss,’ Emil praises without laughing at all. ‘You are a funny kid. Almost as funny as the implication that naked is a state of matter.’

Eli shrugs in his general direction.

‘So what I’m doing right now is checking your thyroid levels, your nutritional balance, and any remaining chemicals in your system to see how fast your metabolism runs. What this should tell me is mostly stuff about how your brain works, and what kind of health your body might be in without taking in unaccounted injury, that sort of thing.’

‘Raucous,’ Eli says facetiously.

‘Right that. With this kind of data, I can approximate your diet, what kind of toxins are in your natural environment, and how precocious you might be,’ Emil continues rambling.

‘Precocious enough to make your life hell,’ Eli mumbles.

‘I’m using the word precocious in reference to pubetic onset,’ Emil informs him, grinning over his work as he slots blood vials into a rotary. ‘I could use your ichor here to estimate how wet your sheets are every morning.’

Eli’s face flushes.

‘And that’s exactly what I’m going to do,’ the doctor says then with a note of finality on which he pushes a button and the rotary begins spinning violently.

‘Now! Brain scan!’ 

And Emil bounds across the room similarly to a borzoi that hadn’t been turned into a human so much as stretched to match one’s general shape.

Eli watches in shocked horror, only remembering to follow when Staff Seargent Begum puts a firm hand on his arm and guides him down off the table toward another bed sitting half in and half out of a big, metal donut. 

‘Ever had one of these before?’ Emil asks gleefully as the Staff Seargent gently manhandles Eli down onto the tablet and into the restraints. 

‘Er, not that I know of,’ Eli tells him uncertainly.

‘Ooh then this is exciting, isn’t it?’ Emil demands gleefully, drumming those stick fingers against the donut’s siding.

‘What’s it do?’ Eli asks, trying for the most even tone he can muster. 

‘It’s gonna let me take a picture of your brain.’ There’s a wibbling excitement in Emil’s voice as he says this. A kind of sing song vibrato that’s anything but pleasant. 

‘It’s not going to cut my head open is it?’ Eli asks.

Emil gives him a wide, Cheshire smile. ‘Not if you hold very, very still,’ he says.

Staff Seargent Begum chuckles a bit as he belts Eli’s head into place.

‘What’s so funny?’ Eli barks but this only makes Begum laugh harder. ‘Is he lying?’

The table is moving now, and Eli can feel panic rising in his throat but all the Seargent replies with is more laughter.

‘What’s he lying about?’ Eli demands, as the donut slides into place above him.

He hears Emil’s voice outside, muffled by his enclosure, ‘Just close your eyes and hold very still, you’ll be fine.

The donut over and around him, is beginning to spin. Slowly at first with large whomping rotations, round and round his head. He screws his eyes shut, clenches his fists and holds stiff as a board. It must not actually take a long time for the spinning to stop, but from within the machine it feels like ages before they pull him back out, shocked and gasping for air.

‘Not bleeding, am I?’ Eli asks as Begum goes to work on his straps in reverse order.

Begum snickers at him before Emil interrupts. 

‘It’s a brain scan,’ the long doctor explains. ‘It’s not actually designed to cut your head open. But the idea is still to get a picture, so it works a little like an X-ray. I’m sure you’ve had one of those.’

‘A few times,’ Eli agrees, rubbing his newly freed wrists. ‘Never strapped me down to a table for an X-ray.’

‘Well, X-rays are still a little different. Instead of using radiation to see through your body to your bones, we use electro magnetism and fire it through your head as fast as possible until we get a fully rendered image. Then I get to read it.’

‘Won’t that give me the loonies?’ Eli asks.

Emil gives him an odd look. ‘Beg pardon?’

‘Won’t it make me daft if you just magnetize my brain like that?’

Emil’s face collapses from searching to amused incredulity, and he flicks one of those grotesque hands in Eli’s general direction to wave the question off. ‘Oh no, definitely not.’ 

Which is flat enough what he has to say on the matter before he rings his appendages together again, and chirps. ‘Well, come back and see me for a check up any time, scheduled or not.’

Staff Seargent Begum marches Eli back out of the room without another word to Emil.

They pause outside the door again just long enough for Eli to give the man a harsh look. ‘You could have told me it wouldn’t cut my head open.’

The Staff Seargent only snickers again before moving onward. 

‘Barracks is on the south end of the complex,’ he begins explaining after their strides have fallen back into rhythm.

Eli hums a sound of understanding softly under his breath. ‘Is that where we’re going now?’ 

‘Get you settled in, yes,’ Begum says. 

There’s another beat of silence before he adds, ‘Men have brought your personal effects up ahead of time.’

‘Cor,’ Eli says and they fall into another silent treck through the matrices of hallways and courtyards until they come upon a set of metal stairs and climb it collamourously to the second level.

‘You’ve room 111 on the end there,’ Begum tells him. ‘Lunch call at 1300 hours. If you haven’t managed to find the cafeteria by then you won’t be getting any.’ With that the man silently excuses himself back down the stairs. 

Eli paces the open face hallways outside the barracks for a moment, wondering about the limits to the freedom of his perceived loneliness before he sucks down the gnawing need to be out of here, and opens the 111th door. He’s greeted with a row of empty bunks lining the walls so there’s a narrow hallway between their feet. 

His effects, a bag with two extra uniforms, and a toiletry kit are lying at the foot of a bottom bunk in the middle but, seeing as he’s the only boy in the dorm, he moves them to the top bunk on the side of the room farthest from the hallway. 

There’s nothing to do. The little stop watch in his bag tells him it’s only 1215.

Certainly, he tells himself, exploring is something to do. Just about the only thing to do on this dusty old continent. Then he looks to the door and thinks about the date palm, sumptuously reclined against the wall by the infirmary.

Exploring it’ll have to be. 

-

The date palm. 

If one were to scale it he would end up covered in stickiness and bugs, and most likely bitten by a rat as well. Eli stands about ten yards from it’s base, staring up at it’s buzzing ecosystem, trying to dare himself to climb. Dare himself to reach his hands through the old dead leaves to grip the bark beneath. But as anyone who’s ever been a child can tell you it’s impossible to dare yourself. 

Every now and then, the warders pass through the courtyard, but none stop to watch him. 

Instead of harassment he gets a sense of the rhythm of their comings and goings. Security measures that will have to be upped if they want to have any hope of keeping him here for their little exercise. 

He sees it like a game of chess. Always has. This constant war he fights against his handlers. Planning steps before it’s even close to time to deploy them, and manuervering through the civility of silence in the face of thinly veiled animosity from your opponent.

The courtyard is hot and dusty. Gentle breezes toy softly with the sand, kicking it up in clouds of yellow and orange, but ultimately failing to relieve the heat of the day. More interested in their game than their intended purpose. 

The little gusts paint dust to his clothing until he tires of his speculation, and moves on to the exploring he promised himself. Inside the walls for now. No need to raise suspicion. 

The complex sprawls across a stretch of arid land, switching back and fourth square by square, each dotted with a little courtyard interconnected to each other by awned hallways. It’s sparsely landscaped with the occasional local palm in a haphazard manner that indicates it was entirely by accident or a neglect to remove them as the compound was built. Here, or there a bush, a crop of wild grass, or small, ground clinging flowers grow in similar defiance to the advance of man.

It’s hideous. 

Inefficient with it’s many open, unused spaces. One or two floor concrete boxes with hollow eyes and slackened jaws gazing like idiots out at him. Judgemental even in their poor status. Cracked concrete faces speaking to age and forgotten purpose in awe of his honed, but yet unused, youth. 

It feels too small and enclosure, and he too large an animal, to be kept in.

He walks this crisscrossing of courtyards until he feels he’s seen all of the outside, even marked the coming and going of men from a particular door as a likely entrance to the cafeteria. Then he grows tired of the repetition. The seemingly unending pattern that loops this small bit of grassy desert. Just a bunch of squares zig zagging in circles.

The sun is starting to sag in the sky. Heavy and fat with heat. 

Eli makes his way back into the courtyard with the date palm. There are a few men loitering around the square, leaning against walls under awnings, smoking cigarettes, and talking with all the languitidy of the freshly fed.

A few of them point in his direction, and share hushed gossip as he trudges out onto the sand. The afternoon sunlight paints an aura of gold around the top of his head. 

He stops just short of the tree, and looks back over his shoulder at the watchful adult eyes trained to him. Looks of curiosity and suspicion dot the faces of the attending men as he reaches out and pulls down a bough heavy with a bushel of over ripe dates. 

Flies buzz around his face and arms but he ignores them. Their noise. The sensation of them sucking on his sweat damp skin. As he picks a big, squishy nut out of the bunch and pops it in his mouth, rucking his teeth through the soft, gummy outsides to clean the pit.

Then he looks back over at the men, their shock growing into horror and repeats the behavior. Open mouths watch his movements with glinting, white keratin eyes. 

This, however, is an important step. They must know. Only then do they have the potential to understand and respect.

-

Evening comes on quickly after his late luncheon display of dominance. The hot sun grows lazy, and deceptive as the breeze kicks up into wind across the flat face of the dry, cracked earth, battering the sparse foliage that’s bold enough to grow there, and tugging on the tops of scattered trees.

It bites through his clothing to gnaw on the heat of his body as the desert begins to reveal it’s promises as lies. Claws at the packed earth, ripping up the loosened sand laying innocently over it, and sending it spiraling through the darkening day. 

Eli sits on the landing outside his to be shared dorm room, and watches it’s flight across the land blankly. It’s song, low and constant ululation, speaks of an untamable freedom. Something forever beyond human grasp. Whispers with promises of a home he can never have. 

When night falls, he tells himself, the hunting begins.


	2. 12 Faces For A Coven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Took longer than four days lmao

By the time the week rolls by, Eli’s found himself a comfortable rhythm. 

They run drills during the day. Their highest ranking man, Begum, an OR 6 in his forties, plays Headmaster for his ‘school’. The few real officers, somehow put up with taking his orders while playing teachers. Eli finds it particularly amusing to watch them bumble about figuring out teaching personas in the time it takes the others to arrive, but this show of incompetence does little to instill the obedience in him they wish to have. 

At night, he steals away to the date palm between watch shifts, and scales it’s sticky sides, using fronds to swing his way back down onto the ground on the other side. He knows if he means to leave, truly, and not come back here, he must learn how to survive in the Namibian wastes. The reason they’d chosen to relocate him in the first place was due to his confidence in the face of the prospect of roughing it in London. 

It’s strategy. When infiltrating a new environment one must learn the animals. How big are they and what do they eat? The shapes and contents of their droppings help determine this. So do their tracks. If you can track an animal, you can watch it. See proof of suspected staple foods. Learn what’s poisonous and what’s not. Where they seek shelter. How to kill them.

The grasses in the desert are strong and playable, but they brittle quickly once picked and are not very good for weaving rope. His small game escapes the traps he makes with them. He’ll need to find better material somewhere to make his own. In the meantime stolen will have to do. 

This preoccupation of thought, learning the ins and outs of the wilds beyond the walls of his enclosure, dwindles his rapport with ‘staff’. They begin to gossip about him as a spooky sort. An odd, and haunted child. 

By the day the charges are scheduled to arrive, Eli has begun to make himself a nasty reputation. Mostly because he refuses to eat the food prepared in the cafeteria. But also due to his general behavior toward his superiors, most of whom are only superiors by thechnicallity, being enlisted men like the Staff Seargent. 

One thing Eli’s learned in all his years as an officer in training: the Enlisted aren’t worth their salt, and that’s all they’re made of.

When they come they come two by two in helicopters, each touching down in a separate courtyard. Children, most of them about his own age pile out, heads stooped for fear of the blades despite their mostly diminutive heights.

Eli crowds against a wall, hidden behind curious ward soldiers, and watches. 

They’re skinny and brick built and waifish, one or two are even a bit heavy set with pot bellies and double chins. Most of them seem nothing like soldiers at all to him. Not even in some potentiality far in the future. Just children with no fire in their eyes. Children who have no discipline, and no desire to kill.

Still, even as disappointing as he finds them, he wants them with every inch of his being.

They represent something. A concept. An idea. A power he has yet to achieve. One they tell him his father passed down. The ability to rally the aimless. The depressed and downtrodden. Even the criminal.

They stand in hardly a line, bumbling about, bumping into each other. Complaining in the way that children complain. About the heat, the dust, the wind. 

And even though these had been his complaints upon arrival, he finds himself thinking of them as foolish for expecting anything else form a desert. 

Staff Seargent Begum runs them through their orientation at top volume as the helicopters become pinpricks in the sky. They manage to shuffle into two distinct, straight lines upon his orders, scratching their heads and bums like toddlers, but not much else. Most seem overwhelmed but the volume of the address. 

He snickers to himself over the spectacle. A grave mistake he doesn’t realize, as one of the soldiers notices him standing there behind everyone and pushes him out through the line into the courtyard so he’s forced to hurriedly join the other boys. 

None of them even bother turning to look at him, too preoccupied by Begum’s customary diatribe.

‘Decorum,’ Begum is shouting when Eli actually begins paying attention. ‘Discipline will be key to your survival in this facility! Nothing will matter more than your obedience, and if you fail to meet the standard set in anyway, the consequences will be dire!’

‘What’s he mean by consequences,’ the boy in front of Eli squeaks to the boy across from him in the other line. 

‘Like caining, I s’pose,’ the other boy says, grinding the toe of his new issue boot into the hard sand, 

‘Don’t think they’ll strip our skin?’ The first boy presses.

‘S’pose,’ the second responds.

‘Listening will be the backbone of your education! Your engagement!’ Begum continues, pointing to the boys, ‘Attention to detail! An ability to shut your mouth will be what gets you through your sentence here!’

As he says this, both boys are pulled out of line by attending warders, and stood at the front of the assembly. 

‘You,’ Begum says, tone the typical growl of the enlisted, less comparable to wine than soy sauce. ‘Will be our examples. You wish to test the limits of my patience!’ He shouts, stooping almost in half to put his face into theirs. 

They both jump, and try to scatter, but he grabs them by their shirt collars and hauls them back to muffled laughter from the class.

‘First thing you lads need to learn is how to give me your attention.’ Begum continues hollaring. He wrenches the first boy’s arm up and shoves his hand into a shabby salute, then clamps the other into the small of his back, and kicks his feet together so hard he nearly looses his balance. 

‘What’s your name, lad?’ Begum asks then, suddenly and imposingly quiet. The boy mumbles something back to him, and the Staff Seargent straightens again before shouting, ‘Cadet Swalling, if you break this salute at any point during this orientation I will force you to run drills around this courtyard during lunch. I, your peers, and the men will get to eat our food in the shade, and watch you run yourself to bones! Have I made myself clear.’

Kiddet Swalling mumbles something quietly. Which Begum meets with a loud, ‘I can’t hear you!’ 

This repeats until the boy is near tears, screaming his understanding to the assembly.

‘Same goes too for you, Cadet,’ Begum snaps, pointing to the second boy, who pops into a salute of his own without even nodding.

The sun is climbing in the sky and shadows grow short beneath tired little bodies. Wrinkles forming on the face of the day as it begins to feel it’s age. The boys up front shake in their arms where they hold them, shading their eyes in salute. Their faces slowly turning red with the effort as the orientation debriefing wares on and on. And the shadows press ever forward over the sand. First into near nothingness beneath them and then into lengthening specters on their rights.

By the time the waxy old tart is done braying like the ass he is, poor Swalling and his dear friend the nameless one both look nothing short of misery with their mouths twisted into lipless lines and faces red with strain. When, finally, he turns and calls the command ‘at ease,’ they’ve begun to shake all down their bodies, and Eli can hardly keep himself from auditory giggles in the face of their softness. 

‘All dismissed!’ Begum hollers, as he trudges toward the shade of the hallway after telling them to wait on the yard for their drill instructor.

The boys in the courtyard instantly brake into groups of two and three, chatting, gossiping. Not like men gossip. Not like Eli watches soldiers do daily, but in a way he’s never seen before. Instantly he feels it. That ever present removal he always feels around civilian children. 

‘Ey!’ One boy calls over to him. ‘’Oo’s you?’

‘Er,’ Eli says, scrambling to remember his own name. ‘Eli.’

The boy makes a sudden grab for his hand, and Eli has to resist twisting his arm for the friendly foreignness of the shake he gives it. ‘I’m Charlie,’ he says in an accent that’s all dirt and no shine. It matches up to Eli’s carefully measured middle class voice at odd angles. ‘Reenly. You got a last name there, Eli?’

Eli gives him a single shoulder shrug.

‘Not a Jew then, right?’ Charlie asked.

Eli shakes his head. ‘Wouldn’t know.’

‘Haven’t got any parents?’

‘No,’ Eli admits.

‘Sucks to the orphaned,’ Charlie laughs.

‘Innit,’ agrees Eli.

‘I ain’t seen you on the boat. Thought I met everyone before they put us on them old whirlybirds,’ Charlie tells him. ‘You from a colony or sommat?’

‘Nah, London.’

‘Proper that,’ Charlie agrees. ‘I’m from Kensington myself.’

Eli nods. He’d got out that side of the Thames and had ended up round about those parts. He knows a little of the area, and can imagine the kind of life someone like Charlie Reenly might have lived before he was stuck coming here to this nasty place. Living in a row house with parents regularly away to pay bills, ditching out of school because there was no one to make him go, and picking pockets or fights to cope with the boredom like the boys Eli had known there. ‘Proper,’ he says.

Charlie smiles at him the way a child would smile at a friend, and Eli feels a pale imitation of a human mirroring it back. As though he is pressing his body against a barrier invisible to everyone around him but inscrutable to himself, trying to see the other side. It makes him feel like Emil’s brain scan did drive him batty. Or maybe he’s been batty all along and it’s in his genes.

Damn his genes.

‘Wann’oo meet the others?’ Charlie asks him.

‘Cor,’ Eli agrees, and so Charlie wraps a scrawny arm around his shoulders and presents him to the rest of the lot. 

‘Oi, you lot, turn around and have a look see what I’ve found while you was gossiping like mags and hags,’ the boy shouts. 

Eli rakes his teeth over his bottom lip as the boys comply, turning to stare at him appraisingly. 

Charlie continues presently: ‘This stranger here’s Eli. Ain’t got no last name ‘cause he’s a bastarding orphan, and likes to play spooky-like.’

Eli looks at Charlie, mouse brown hair, nose straight but too long for his child’s face, eyes smaller than they ought to be, and thin lips, folded in on themselves over a slightly lacking chin. He doesn’t look the leader type, but the others pay mind to him. In their social circle he holds the share, generates the most positive and negative charge within the group.

If he can win Charlie, either through guile or force, he can win the group. Eli knows this. He’s had classes and classes on it. They’ve told him thousands of times. He still remembers Dr. Clarke’s ever hardening mouth as it recited these invaluable knowledges to him.

He smiles at the boy next to him, not the friendly smile he had tried to imitate earlier . It’s a more familiar smile to him. A scheming kind of smile. Charlie, however, sees it, and mistakes it’s nature for the first type. And oh, Eli thinks, this should all be very easy. Very easy indeed.

‘Now left to right-like,’ Charlie continues holding his arm out to point at the boys before them. That’s Arthur, he’s from north country and he talks like a cunt so bad you can’t understand him. That next to him that’s, Er, Nancy. That’s not his name but we call him that because his names stupid so no one remembers also and he’s a nancy.’

‘Just you,’ Nancy shouts. ‘Only you’re the one what can’t remember. Don’t go an-‘ but Charlie cuts him off by continuing his line of introductions as boldly as they were started.

‘And that fellow there’s Ira. Short for IRA ‘cause he’s a republican-kind what tried to blow somfink up, right Ira?’

Ira nods.

‘Then there-after, we’ve Jimbo. Long for Jimmy, short for James. Harry and Berry, they’re brothers gone down for some shit store robbery,’

‘Shag yourself,’ one of the two shouts and they both throw the kind of crude salutes that could earn any soldier, otherwise or officer, a night or two in chokey. 

‘There’s Oliver, and the Cockney, and Britney, and Hector, and Matthew.’

‘Only twelve of you?’ Eli asks.

‘Means you make thirteen,’ Matthew, who Eli recognizes as Swalling, says in an uncomfortably tight voice. 

Eli looks at him sideways, tries to put the viper back in his face as best he can because that’s something these boys, not even the half soldier Ira, who’s the tallest of the lot, have or have likely ever seen up close and personal. Not even in their old veteran grandfathers, kept away from the children so the shell shock never shows. 

‘Superstitious kind, are you?’ He presses

Matthew gives him an odd look. Somewhere between stubborn and startled.

Eli crosses his arms and leans into Charlie’s support to ground his stance even further. ‘I’ll tell you something, Matty. You go believing in monsters that go bump in the night, you’ll miss the things you ought to be worrying about. The real beasts. And they’re a hungry lot so you’d best not long forget them.’

‘Wha’s tha’ s’pposed to mean?’ Cockney asks confirming his presumed nickname with the incredible thickness of his accent. 

He points to the guards walking the hallways above them. ‘Have you seen them?’

They look around them, nodding awe-fully.

‘You know what guns that is they carry?’

A small chorus of dissent answers him.

‘L1A1s,’ Ira observes.

Eli nods to the boy. ‘Or more commonly: SLRs. Short for Self Loading Rifle. Our response to the Belgium FN FAL. That’s twenty to thirty bullets it holds without needing to be reloaded. Gas operated so any fumes off the initial fire are used to ready for the next bullet’s ejection. It could pump you full of enough lead to lay you flat in seconds as far away as near six hundred meters.’ And pausing for effect, scanning the innocent round faces turned toward him. ‘And you’d die much, much slower.’

Charlie withdraws his arm from around Eli’s neck, slowly inching back into the safety of the other boys.

‘So I’d hope you all understand there’s only one kind of spooky ghost to worry about bumping in the night, and it’s men,’ he states, making his point to the horror stricken children before him.

‘Oi, lads!’ Comes a call from off the yard behind him.

He turns to see the drill instructor, a short, brushy sort of man with a crop of silver-brown hair and an over abundant garden planted in the middle of his face where he grows his moustace. The type of full grown adult man to rather wear shorts with his uniform should the situation arise in which he can get away with it. Such as now. ‘Cut the chit-chat. Especially you, Eli, don’t want you filling their heads with fuck-all knows what spooky shit you’re on about.’

Eli gloweres at the man, who, to his adult buffoonery, ignores the attention as he continues addressing the class.

‘As you are the first class here at Kalambesa School Of Refinment For Criminal Boys-‘

‘Is that what you’ve all decided to call it then?’ Eli heckles, but the man continues undisturbed,

‘You’ll be alone on the campus! Joyous for you as you’ll have all the more space I presume. Irregaudless of all that, I am Corporal Deanhive and I’ve a hearty breakfast here for anyone who can show me he’s strong enough to last his term in our cirruculum.’ He says, clipping the heels of his boots together and stuffing his whistle in his mouth.

‘I want twenty pushups, boys,’ he shouts around the thing, voice taking on an amusingly hard edge before he tweets on it three times and makes a harsh trilling noise shrill enough it scares most of the civilians down on their hands and knees despite their reluctance. 

Eli drops with them in that moment, moving out of discipline rather than fear, or shock like the others. Once again part of the group only in principle. He shares a brief glance with Ira, the only other kid around with any military training, under the nose of a few boys struggling to keep pace with the beats of the whistle, and feels at least the breath of a kinship there. A vague hope of being able to relate to his new unit. 

Then, in something between awe, and complete befuddlement, they both turn their heads back at once and see that four of the boys have not dropped at all, and are not keeping pace with the others.

The instructor walks his way slowly around the boys. Boots planting themselves in the dust with sharp purpose. 

From their positions on the ground, those boys scared enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough to drop on command cannot see what is going on above and behind them as they keep time with their efforts. They are simply aware of the movement around them. Those boys who were too brave, or too dumb, or simply too slow in their reactions, being pulled out of line one by one.

Eli keeps his breathing shallow and quiet, trying to listen for what might be going on around them, but this is all he can do to search for understanding without breaking orders and winning a punishment himself. Even if it is his unit and he should be allowed to know it’s status at all times.

‘What are you gonna do, shoot me?’ One boy asks, and Eli can’t pick him out from the list of vaguening names in his mind by voice alone. ‘Kill me like what Eli says?’

‘Oh I can do a lot worse than that,’ Corpral Deanhive assures.

The ragged breathing of one of the struggling boys next to Eli takes on a hysteric edge

‘What do you think this is?’ Deanhive asks.

‘Reform school,’ the same boy answers.

Deanhive laughs. ‘Aren’t most reform schools in England proper? Why would her royal magesty’s government put a reform school Oll the way in Africa?’

Silence, or muttered voices too low to be heard under labored breathing, and the sound of sand crunching under hands and toes as the boys fall out of synch in their movements.

‘You’d do well to remember not hardly anyone knows you’re here, and even if they did you’re exactly the kind of children not that many people should truly care about being gone seeing as they let us take you in the first place.’

‘Hadn’t much choice did we?’ Another boy’s voice pipes in.

‘No,’ deanhive agrees. ‘You haven’t.’

There’s a pause and then the man hollers to address the class in full with a harsh, ‘At Ease.’

The boys come to a halt in their now disjointed pushups, and slowly push themselves back onto their feet, dusting sand and gravel from their hands and the bare caps of their knees. When they’ve finally got themselves upright they come face to face with the four who disobeyed. One of them is easily recognized as Cockney, Matthew Swalling’s once nameless friend. Clearly too stupid for a lesson to sink through his fat head.

‘Cadets,’ Deanhive addresses them. ‘You are looking at four men who do not respect you or your discipline. Four men who would rather do as they wish and see you fail than do as they have been rightly told and support you. These men are far from your friends. As it stands now they are hardly your countrymen. They are, in principle, traitors. What do we do with traitors?’

There’s a sound of shuffling as the boys look at one another, searching for what to do in this situation. Eli holds his tongue carefully still and says nothing but Ira raises his hand as if this is a regular phys-ed class. 

‘What’s that there?’ Deanhive asks, pointing to him.

Ira’s hand comes down slowly, and his mouth opens just as slowly because certainly even if they’re politically opposed to you, an idiot, and from another country, you’d think twice to sell out any boy you shared a room with nightly, let alone four.

‘Well with political traitors you hang them, sir,’ Ira says tentatively to a gasp of shock from other the children around him. ‘But as it’s not a political betrayal, and they haven’t yet endangered the unit wouldn’t it be more fit to give them some sort of reprimand?’

‘Is that what you want?’ Deanhive rages. ‘A slap on the wrist? You think that’s all they deserve? You want to mollycoddle them?’

Ira has the decency to look ashamed, but before anyone can defend him for begging a lenient sentencing, Deanhive shouts on.

‘That simply won’t do, no. I’ll show you what we do with traitors here in our school.’ And then, to the boys who had disobeyed him, ‘Do you see that sun lads? You’re going to sweat in it. You see our toilets are backed up in the staff barracks on the south side of this compound, and we’re in need of a row of usable latrines for the men. Now in light of the fact that none of you idiots are plumbers or have any necessary life skills for that matter, I’ll make it easy for you. Private Eardin there will take you to get your shovel, and take you out where you need to dig, and you will dig until he tells you stop digging, am I clear?’

Deanhive stops, glaring intently at them as they answer back with a chorus of weak ‘Yes sir’s.

‘You haven’t made me confident you understand me, boys! Am I clear?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Am I clear?!’

‘Yes sir!’

‘Get out of my sight!’

Silence has eaten the sun bleached strip of sand the rest of the class stands on. Deanhive turns around like a machine, looks at each of them in their face through his reflective, golden glasses, and smiles. 

‘Now give me three laps of the yard, and show me how many crunches you can do,’ Deanhive demands, tweeting his whistle again.

-

After their drills and once they’ve eaten their breakfast, the Corpral gives them a tour of the facility, sure to stop them by their disobedient classmates, and encourage them to laugh jeeringly in their dusty faces.

Then they have a late lunch, evening classes, dinner, and are sent up to their dorms smelling like the mud the dust made when it found itself clinging to their sweaty skin.

The line for the shower is long. Only three boys being able to wash at once and none of them being very efficient washers.

Eli forgoes it the way he foregoes joining them for food. Instead he takes his towel set, one large and one small, a bowl, and gives himself a sponge down where he needs it most before buffing the rest of the dirt off. 

A few of the civilians watch him curiously as they wait, but say nothing. 

By the time they’re all showered, and changing into their night clothes, Eli’s tucked into his bunk, waiting for the room to go silent so that he can return to his own business of preparation.


End file.
